Performance Management Group (PMG) CallsLearn from the experience of leading hospital administrators and nationally recognized field experts. PMG calls allow peer-to-peer education focused on preparing rural hospitals for new payment and care delivery models.

April 2019

April 2019

Thank you for all of your hard work on the Flex applications and the Flex Emergency Medical Services (EMS) Supplement applications. We are busy with the review process.

Your project officers have shared the potentially ineligible Critical Access Hospitals (CAHs) that didn’t meet Medicare Beneficiary Quality Improvement Project (MBQIP) reporting requirements over the past year. We will be accepting MBQIP waiver requests for FY 2019 (9/1/2019 – 8/31/2020) until Friday, May 17, 2019. Please email the completed waivers to your project officer. Please send us the waivers early if possible so that you have time to make changes if we aren’t able to approve the waiver as initially submitted.

As we discussed in February, the current Flex grants will end on August 31, 2019, as we transition to new awards under the cooperative agreement format. This means that you will need to request a no-cost extension if you have current Flex funds that you won’t spend by August. Please let your project officer know now if you think you may have unspent funds. I will share more information on the no-cost extension process next month.

I hope you’ve also had a chance to read the April 16 letter from Mike McNeely about expectations in the Hospital State Division that recipients spend award funds in the year they are awarded. When it comes to future carryover requests we will apply heightened scrutiny to unspent funds budgeted for personnel and travel following the policy described by Mike.

This project is/was supported by the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) under grant number UB1RH24206, Information Services to Rural Hospital Flexibility Program Grantees, $1,205,000 (0% financed with nongovernmental sources). This information or content and conclusions are those of the author and should not be construed as the official position or policy of, nor should any endorsements be inferred by HRSA, HHS or the U.S. Government.

Upcoming Events

In this SHIP Technical Assistance (TA) Webinar, Pennsylvania (PA) Flex Coordinator, Jennifer Edwards will share how her state is utilizing SHIP funds to prepare hospitals for the transition to global budgeting.

This LC webinar is for pre-selected SRHT eligible hospital leadership teams only. In this third Learning Collaborative (LC) webinar, hospital teams will be prepped to develop their Balanced Scorecards.